A Multi-start Simulated Annealing using Immunity-based Operations and its Application to the Quadratic Assignment Problems

S. Koakutsu, T. Hamagami, and H. Hirata (Japan)

Keywords

Simulated Annealing, Immune System, Quadratic Assignment Problem

Abstract

Simulated Annealing (SA) is known as one of useful
heuristic optimization techniques. However the performance of standard SA depends on an initial state at starting temperature due to one-point search feature of SA.
In this paper, to overcome the dependency on the initial
state, we propose a novel optimization method named
Multi-start Simulated Annealing using an Immunity
based Operations (MSA/Io) introducing some features
of immune system into Multi-start SA (MSA) which
searches the solution space for optimal solutions in parallel starting from more than one initial state. We high
light two mechanisms of immune system called “clonal
selection” and “idiotypic network.” Clonal selection intensiﬁes searching in the neighborhood of good solutions and idiotypic network maintains the diversiﬁcation of the search. MSA/Io is expected to improve the
local search ability using clonal selection and improve
the global search ability using idiotypic network. We
demonstrate the efﬁciency of MSA/Io by applying it to
the quadratic assignment problems. Experimental results
indicate that MSA/Io performs better than SA and MSA.